AMPTE

Copyright WDC C1 for STP at RAL.

The Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorers (AMPTE) programme was a joint project of the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States to explore plasma phenomena in near-Earth space (the magnetosphere, magnetosheath, solar wind and the boundaries between these regions). These studies included not only passive measurements of the natural plasma but also active experiments in which tracer ions were released into the space plasma environment.

Each country contributed one spacecraft:

• the Ion Release Module (IRM) from Germany;
• the United Kingdom Satellite (UKS) from the UK;
• the Charge Composition Explorer (CCE) from the USA.

For full details of the mission, the reader should consult the May 1985 special issue of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (volume GE-23, number 3) which contains 24 papers describing the three spacecraft, their instruments and data handling.

We reference 14 papers appropriate to our data holdings throughout this help.

Help created 26 February 1993 by BADC
Help revised 27 November 1995 by WDC C1 Staff

Additional information available:

• References
• Orbits
• UKS_Spacecraft
• IRM_Spacecraft
• Position_Separation

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